Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (29 page)

Helstead waved good-bye at him and shrugged. “I can focus just fine, Captain. I just…have to keep doing something, or I’ll go nuts.”

“Then we have something in common,” Ia told her. “Only in my case, the ‘something’ I constantly have to keep doing is striving to save the future.”

“So, how’s that working out for you?” Helstead quipped.

The joke caught Ia by surprise. She chuckled. “We’ll see. I still have several years of work ahead of me. Feel free to help out if you get bored.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Helstead quipped.

Both women fell silent as they traveled up several decks to the briefing room. Located forward of the bridge, it was meant for the cadre to use, or up to two squads at a time. The monitors lining the cabin caught Ia’s attention first, followed by the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Lieutenant Rico.

He stood in front of screens filled with series of dots, circles, and lines that made up the written form of Sallhash, language of the frogtopus-like Salik. Around the oval table at the center of the room sat Corporal Xhuge, Private Dinyadah, Private MacInnes, and Private Al-Aboudwa, all members of the 1st Platoon. They had workstations clipped to the table; from what Ia could see of Al-Aboudwa’s and Xhuge’s screens, the two men were attempting to match location names to star charts.

“Glad you could join us, Captain,” Rico stated in a mild tone. “I hope we didn’t interrupt anything important.”

“I put you in charge of this project because I knew I could trust you with it,” Ia returned calmly. “You cannot compose detailed, time-sensitive instructions that will save hundreds of billions of lives. You, however, can make sense of this Salik gibberish, and
that
will help save hundreds of billions of lives. Now, I understand you’ve found something?”

“We think so, sir,” Corporal Xhuge said, speaking before Rico could. Ia had to give him credit for getting the discussion back on topic. “Since you said you were able to pinpoint the exact comm nodes containing information on where and how these anti-psi machines were being manufactured, once we cracked open the databank cases, we broke down all the various messages in the selected banks and started sorting each by type.”

Rico joined the explanation. “Most of them were about the transport of goods, involving timetables, ships, requisitions…standard stuff. Much of it used cryptography, or the substitution of things like letters and numbers, which can be cracked by any competent computer system. Even the most sophisticated ones back in their day from Old Earth’s Enigma machines all the way up through the AI War codes were breakable, given time and understanding. But some of the messages were different.

“They were asking for weird things with no apparent context. That meant they were using steganography,” he told Ia. “It’s the art of substituting one word for another. The catch is, you have to know which words substitute for which. Like the Navajo code talkers on Old Earth, same era as the Enigma machines. But it’s always heavy on the nouns, even among the xenospecies, and that’s where MacInnes came in handy.”

MacInnes nodded quickly, her carrot curls bouncing around her ears. “My Sallhash still isn’t the best, sir, but it works in conjunction with my xenopathy and clairvoyancy. I can ‘see’ a noun in my head when I’m translating it mentally. The nouns the lieutenant handed me on the weird requisition cases
weren’t
the ones I was actually seeing and writing down.”

“I figured her gifts would be useful that way when I read the notes you appended in her personnel file,” Rico interjected.

“Like I said, I picked the right man to head up this job, and the right meioas to work with you,” Ia reminded him. She nodded at the other woman. “Go on, MacInnes. What were the disparities?”

“Instead of…uh…” She blushed and nodded at her workstation. “Well, we can’t pronounce most of these words without the nasal flaps and such, so we’re using the Terran phonemes. Anyway, the weirdest one was a message about an order of
po-jeem ang-nu-gwish-tick-wa
, which is a kind of amphibious
creature they like to eat on their M-class colonyworld of Hawhonn. But instead of alien breakfast food, I was getting images of anthikeriate coils, which are used in the PsiLeague’s KI machines to sense kinetic-inergy emanations, and I only knew
that
much because I helped refurbish a couple during a summer job back in high school.”

“And some of the other nouns?” Helstead asked, dropping into one of the chairs at the table and swirling it around.

“Electronics components, mostly. But also…test subjects,” Al-Aboudwa stated quietly. “We found dates and times for prisoner swaps.”

“The images I saw were meant to imply tasty-smart food,” MacInnes muttered, looking a little pale. She wasn’t the only one. Xhuge and Al-Aboudwa didn’t look comfortable, either.

“—Found it!” Dinyadah exclaimed, pointing at her workscreen. A couple of taps transferred the star charts to the monitors around the room. “God bless methodical mapmaking. Ss’gwish Gaff 117-N, a system with a small class B white star, three asteroid belts, at least four gas giants, and an extensive Kuiper belt with a break in it from a rogue planet expelled by the explosion of a downstream neutron star. That’s our second starting point, gentlemeioas, and it’s approximately twenty light-years from the endpoint in the message.”

“Good job,” Rico praised. “Now all we need is a third location, to triangulate the manufacturing point—the Kuiper belt break has several ice chunks trailing outsystem in the wake of the rogue planet,” he explained to Ia. “The first system we found has the requesting point located approximately eighteen light-years from
Nngu
120-N. But that still leaves us a ring zone with a circumference of one hundred light-years, give or take a few. Since we don’t have any third reference point in the data files, I was hoping
you
could provide us with one, Captain.”

Ia gave him a level look. “What part of ‘these machines can counteract even
my
abilities’ did you not comprehend at our initial task briefing, Lieutenant?”

“The part where you said you’re an omniscient precog?” Rico replied, one brow lifted in skepticism.

“I’m not omniscient. I’m all-
seeing
, not all-
knowing
. And this thing is like a black hole on my internal radar, or a thick cloud obscuring an island,” Ia said, pointing at one of the screens. “I can only tell its general vicinity from the
lack
of
things I can sense about it directly, and from the things I can sense
in
directly. Like our next target.” Moving over to the largest of the screens, she poked at the surface, rotating the stars slightly. “I can sense what people do, Lieutenant, from the effects their lives, their timestreams, have on the timeplains in general.

“I cannot track things as easily as I can track people. Unfortunately, most of the people directly involved in this anti-psi project are being protected by the machines.” Tapping the screen, she drew a circle around three stars in relatively close proximity in green. “Somewhere in here is another communications station. We’re going to attack the second hub, extract the right data nodes, and extrapolate that third point. We’ll have to hurry, since the one thing I am sure about is that the manufacturing equipment is on the move.”

Another tap drew a much larger circle in yellow, one at least forty light-years across. Ia looked over her shoulder at Rico.

“This area is the general area I think it’s in, but as you can see, it’s rather large,” she said. “They’re distributing the machines, too; I get flashes of foreknowledge in between stretches of nothing. Once we do get that third coordinate for triangulation, we move in for the kill and wipe out their main manufacturing facility.”

“D’un yi shia…”
Xhuge muttered, eyes widening as he stared at the yellow-circled zone.
“Da shiong la se la ch’wohn tian!
”

Rico narrowed his eyes. “
Excuse
me, soldier?” he snapped at Corporal Xhuge. “You do
not
swear like that in front of me. I’ll remind you, I
do
speak all three main dialects of Chinese.”

“Yeah, what he said,” Al-Aboudwa agreed, giving his crewmate a puzzled look. “Either swear in Terranglo, or at least tell us what you said, will you?”

“I’m sorry, sirs, meioas,” Xhuge apologized, blushing. He lifted his hand, pointing at the yellow blob. “But that whole zone, if they’re distributing anti-psi machines to their ships, then
that’s
where the main Salik fleet is gathering. If we go in there pods blazing, they’ll swarm in and kill us. Not to mention, they’ll have to figure out which databanks we’re stealing sooner or later. No offense, Captain, but that’s a
tze sah ju yi
!”

“It would be a suicidal idea under normal circumstances, yes,” Ia agreed. “But my abilities strengthen with proximity,
both temporally and spatially. My first encounter, I had no clue what these machines were, but I still managed to destroy a giant capital ship, and I did it with a tiny little Harrier-class Delta-VX. My second time? I rescued dozens of sentients from the Salik Motherworld, and I did it in a room filled with those machines. The third time I was in the room with one of these
kuh wu
machines, I still managed to slam the needle of a KI gauge off the far side with it churning away at full power, sitting right next to me while I was demonstrating the strength of my precognitive abilities.

“As for this actually being a suicidal idea?” she repeated, hands resting on her hips as she studied the corporal. “I’ll tell you something about the future, Xhuge. It’s a suicidal idea for the
Salik
to go to war because by their own efforts, they will destroy themselves. But they are doing it, and we have to stop them. At the right time, in the right way. Now, we have two more days before we’ll be in striking range of the new hub. Let’s keep working at this.”

Dinyadah looked up from her workstation screen at that. Like everyone else on the ship, she traded duty posts every two hours, including stints on the bridge crew. “Sir, I thought the hyperwarp drive was faster than that. When I was last on the bridge, we were only thirty-nine light-years away from the target zone.”

“We could get there faster, yes, but right now, some of that fleet Xhuge’s worried about is still within counterstriking range of the hub,” Ia said. “Not to mention hyperwarp uses almost three times the fuel. If we don’t need to hurry, then we travel FTL. That gives the enemy fleet plenty of time to move on and be well past the turnaround point by the time we come diving in.” Looking at the others, she dipped her head and offered some sincere praise. “You’ve done very well so far. I can’t wait to see what else you can do.”

“Oh, how patronizing. Are you sure you can’t do this yourself?” Rico asked her.

The others gave the two of them watchful, wary looks, not quite sure why Lieutenant Rico was being belligerent. Ia knew why. It wasn’t just that he didn’t believe in her cause, yet—he didn’t—but also because he didn’t like being asked to spy on her. At the same time he didn’t want her to become suspicious of his being too agreeable to her plans right from the start. She
knew he was smart enough to know that too many spies tried being best friends with their targets too soon, and that he knew she was smart enough to realize it, too.

“Some of it, yes.
If
I had the time to spare, I could do some of it,” she finally admitted. “Most of it, no…and what little I could do, I do not have that time to spare. Every single person on board this ship has been hand-selected because each one of you brings a special skill or ability or knowledge to this crew to do all the things that one person, male or female, cannot do on their own.

“It doesn’t matter who that one person is, Lieutenant Rico,” Ia said. “We will all work together, and in doing so, we will get the job done.”

“Any job where I get to destroy the Salik, I’m on it,” Al-Aboudwa stated. He looked up at both officers, first Rico, then Ia. His tanned brow creased, and his thin lips twisted in a grimace. “I
hate
them. They ate my grandfather and my great-uncle. They were merchanters on a supply run into the Blockade Zone, and got caught by a Salik ship trying to make a run for it. If I could put on a p-suit and dance on the corpses we left back at the first site, I’d do it. You need me to fight them, Captain, I’m on your side,” he promised, hands balled in fists on the table. “Anytime, anywhere, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

The others nodded slowly, agreeing with his vehemence.

Ia shook her head. “No, Private. Don’t hate them. Yes, they’re vile, psychotic sentient-eaters. But don’t hate them. Pity them for bringing their deaths upon themselves.”

Helstead snorted. As the others glanced her way, her shoulders shook. “Pity them!” she giggled, then thumped her fists on the armrests of her chair, laughing outright. “Oh, God, that’s mucking funny!”

“What the…?” Xhuge asked her, bemused. Helstead gasped for air, shaking her head. She covered her mouth, then her eyes, snorting and chuckling in her mirth.

“She’s talking about the xenopsychology of the Salik,” Rico said over her giggles. He wasn’t quite laughing, but his mouth had twisted up in a smirk. “Pity is one of the worst insults you could give them. To a Salik, it means the prey they’ve been pursuing has turned out to be utterly unworthy of the time and energy spent on them.”

“Quite right,” Ia agreed. “Though I do mean it in the Human
sense of the word, via compassion. Alright, Helstead has her next split shift on the bridge coming up, and Sergeant Maxwell hasn’t had his dinner, yet. Let me know if you make any breakthroughs, gentlebeings.”

Sobering somewhat, Helstead raspberried that idea, then sighed and stood up. “Right. Off to be an officer, and do all sorts of officerish stuff. In other words, be bored out of my mind while someone else flies the ship. I don’t suppose I could learn how to fly it, Captain?”

“Not this year, Helstead,” Ia countered firmly, gesturing toward the briefing-room door. She nodded politely at the others as Helstead preceded her. “Keep up the good work, meioas.”